1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to transporting articles and, more particularly, is concerned with a manually-powered utility carrier for transporting and storing multiple stacked articles.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In both business and residential environments, articles frequently need to be transported from one location to another. Manually-powered dollies, carts and handtrucks of various constructions have been employed for such purpose. Examples are the hand vehicles disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. to Stark (4,248,453), Zeitlin (4,407,521), Base (4,413,834), Creim (4,469,341), Driggers (4,530,510) and Diener (4,531,752) and in Sporty's Preferred Living Catalog.
Because of irregular, rounded or otherwise awkward shapes, many articles are not easily stacked on conventional dollies and handtrucks and retained thereon while being transported. Firewood logs are a good example of articles difficult to stack and then transport from the exterior to the interior of a building. The prior art hand vehicles of the Base, Creim, Driggers and Diener patents and Sporty's catalog are apparently constructed to specifically address the problems of stacking and transporting such difficult articles.
These prior art hand vehicles may function reasonably well and generally serve the limited purposes for which they were designed. However, each vehicle appears to embody one or more drawbacks which prevents it from providing an optimum solution to these problems. For instance, the hand vehicles of the Base and Creim patents and Sporty's catalog appear to have constructions offering limited capacity in terms of the amount of logs they will hold. The hand vehicles of the Driggers and Diener patents appear to be overbuilt in terms of the large number of parts, the considerable amount of materials and duplication of functions involved in their respective constructions.
Consequently, it is readily apparent that a need still exists for a manually-powered vehicle which will more effectively address the problems associated with stacking and transporting awkward-shaped articles than has been achieved by the hand vehicles of the prior art.